New Social Features: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

Twitter.com Now Automatically Shortens Links: This is something Twitter users have wanted for a long time. Now all you have to do is “just paste a link of any length into the Tweet box on Twitter.com” and Twitter shortens it for you.

After you’ve composed your tweet and you hit the “Tweet” button, Twitter shortens the link so it only takes up 19 characters.

You can turn off the default tagging suggestions through your privacy settings.

Broadcast Live Video on Ning: There’s now a Ning extension for Ustream available for all Ning Plus and Pro subscribers. “The Ustream integration with Ning is designed to be easy to use so you can be up and running within minutes and play streaming video directly to visitors and members on your Ning social site.”

Use the Ning Ustream extension "to run a workshop, talk through a tutorial, or broadcast a live party."

Here’s a social media study worth noting:

New Study on Social Sharing: ShareThis (that little widget that gives users access to many social media sharing buttons) and Starcom MediaVest Group conducted a study on social sharing. They looked at the sharing activity in March of this year across ShareThis’ network of 1 million sites (7 billion sharing signals analyzed) and concentrated on how and what people share and how sharing spreads content. Here are some of the big takeaways:

Almost all sharing and clicking on links is “first generation” with little viral effect, which leads to the conclusion that sharing matters more than virality

Out of 7 billion sharing signals analyzed, sharing accounted for 10% of visits that included 730 million page views

Shared links are clicked on an average of 4.9 times, although this rate varies by sharing channel

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Cindy King is the director of editorial for Social Media Examiner. She spent 25 years abroad in international business development and then built her own international business using social business networking.

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